Adrift, but Anchoring to Each Other

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CreditJames Yang

By Erin Davies

Nov. 18, 2014

On July 30 — the day before our son’s eighth birthday — my husband arrived home early from his office with some unwelcome news: The ad agency he worked for had decided to cut costs and eliminate his position.

It wasn’t the first time. Or the second. We had already lived through two layoffs since 2007. While my husband landed a new job within a year of each layoff, each was in a faraway city. That meant near cross-country moves, selling our home in a falling real estate market and finding new homes, schools and friends.

Because we have two young children, it also meant finding ways to keep our stress from further stressing the kids, who had their own stresses, like being forced to leave so much of what they knew and loved. “Why can’t we just stay where we are?” our daughter plaintively asked more than once.

As for the two of us, keeping the layoff-related stress from stressing our marriage may have been the most challenging and important part of the experience, and we’re facing one crucial question yet again: How do you cultivate an emotional connection with your spouse, your partner, your love, when everything around you seems to be about disconnection? My husband had been repeatedly disconnected from his career and his ideas about himself, and together we repeatedly were looking at disconnection from the lives we had been living. That threatened to disconnect us from each other.

Our answer, though we didn’t realize it at the time, was to invent the game we came to call “Trust Fund.”

Perhaps you’ve played a game like it: One spouse, say me, is doing something like sitting at the dining room table staring at the newly painted, potentially home-buyer-friendly Restoration Hardware Sage Green walls while trying to come up with creative strategies to get blood from a stone, a.k.a. paying the mortgage. While this is happening the other spouse, in our case my husband, Judd, returns home from the grocery store and speeds through the dining room to get the therapeutic Cherry Garcia into the freezer before it melts.

I, Spouse No. 1, call out, “So, did you get The Call?”

Judd, Spouse No. 2, might reply, “Not yet, but it takes a long time to write a check with that many zeros.”

The Call is supposed to be from one of our parents, notifying us that we actually have a mind-blowingly large trust fund and have had it for years. We were never told because we were supposed to make our own way and not feel entitled. Our odds of The Call seemed in our favor; both sets of parents are divorced, so we have four people who could theoretically place The Call. But now, with the repeated layoffs after years of hard work and the disruption to the grandchildren’s lives, we are to have the Trust Fund.

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CreditJames Yang

My husband and I never did receive The Call. We survived without it, but there were months where we thought it was the only way out of a scary, downward trajectory.

Around seven months into our second round of unemployment, there were undeniable financial problems. Our savings and severance were running out, and our substantially mortgaged home remained unsold. Neither of our job searches in our respective imploding industries — advertising and journalism — were going well, though realistically only Judd’s was going to yield an offer that had any hope of paying our bills. We had made the easier spending cuts and had already started to consider tough ones like our son’s preschool and our daughter’s ballet class, both of which provided needed stability. In the midst of the nation’s macro crisis and our own micro one, the odds of our Trust Fund fantasy becoming reality did not feel all that far from the chance that one of us would land a well-paying job.

But my husband did eventually get a job after each layoff, and we, like America, entered a period of economic recovery. We thought about recovery-type things like rebuilding our savings and tackling debt.

We took a close look at one another, too, and when we did we found ourselves in need of a more complicated emotional recovery. Namely, how to deal with our great repression of our Great Recession experience. In the midst of our crisis, we had not told each other how very scared and sad and angry and anxious we often were. It had felt too risky. What if I had told Judd my greatest fears and that caused him to fall apart? What if Judd had divulged his anxieties, ones that had never occurred to me, and I started to cry and couldn’t stop? We couldn’t afford to take those risks. We needed to present ourselves to our children and potential employers — and to some extent each other — as strong people who could be depended on to solve problems and get a job done.

I know this now only because we have finally been able to talk about it over the last few years. Not endlessly or easily, but enough for us both to know not only what we thought and felt back then but what we didn’t always know: that our greatest fear was disconnection from each other.

Trust Fund wasn’t just a game. We played in part to remind each other of why we originally connected. It reminded us of our shared sensibility — our sense of humor and the absurd, but also our ideas about what is important and valuable. It also allowed us to safely acknowledge to each other the profoundly scary experience we were both living. Maybe something that seems so unhealthy in normal life — say, replacing difficult conversations with made-up fantasy games — is the healthiest thing you can do in a crisis.

At least I think it was for us. Between the Great Recession’s official end and Judd’s ability to land new jobs, we were able to take it from there. Ultimately, we were able not only to understand better our fear of disconnection but also to talk about why and how we could not, how we would not, let that distance between us emerge again.

So this time, our third in just seven years, maybe we can do things a little differently. This time maybe we can both tell jokes and have honest conversations about what is bothering us. We may still put on a brave face to our children and potential employers, but we can present ourselves to each other as we really are: angry and fearful sometimes, but also always intensely connected to one other.

And to our phones — you know, just in case we get The Call.

Erin Davies is a writer in Los Angeles.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page F7 of the New York edition with the headline: Adrift, but Anchoring to Each Other. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe